There has been an abundance of crime comics published over the past several months — see, for example, the Two Guys’ earlier discussions of Weird Detective, Control, Kill or Be Killed,Cousin Joseph, Black Monday Murders,and Sombra — but recently this number has been almost dizzying. In the first of a two-episode series devoted to current crime comics, Andy and Derek discuss six titles that take the genre into curious directions. They range from the historical (Rick Geary’s Black Dahlia), to the formula-bending (Chris Hunt’s Carver: A Paris Story and Janet Harvey and Megan Levens’s Angel City), to the genre-blending (Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s Moonshine), to the comedic (Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber’s The Fix), to the truly hardboiled (Walter Hill, Matz, and Jef’s Triggerman as well as Christa Faust, Gary Philips, and Andrea Cameron’sPeepland). There is a lot of crime/detective/noir/procedural goodness packed into this show, and the same is in store for the next week’s episode, the second in the series.

About Derek Royal

The Comics Alternative is a weekly podcast focused on the world of alternative, independent, and primarily non-superhero comics. (There’s nothing wrong with the superhero genre…we just want to do something different.) New shows become available every Wednesday…much like the comic books you get. Episodes feature reviews of graphic novels and current ongoing series, discussions of upcoming comics, examinations of collected editions, in-depth analyses of a variety of comics texts, spotlights on various creators and their oeuvre, roundtable discussions with prominent critics and scholars in the field, and interviews with the artists and writers who make all of this possible. Along the way, Andy and Derek will talk about the various books that they are reading; the many pop cultural references that, for better or worse, inform their lives; and the unpredictable (and inexplicable) weirdness that seems to creep into each episode. In essence,The Comics Alternative podcast is brilliantly simple: Two guys with PhDs talking about comics.